Tag Archives: Thread

I work as an architect at a big telco that has recently become a quad-player. Part of my job is to think of what services come next. My previous interest has always been distributed computing, either networking or large data-sets. Also as part of my job I attend IT conferences on the internet of distributed devices.

My key questions & my current thoughts are:

What will become the distributed identity standard for device authentication?

OpenID Connect (OIDC) (like SAML) is not an AuthN mechanism but extends the OAuth2.0 model. The identity attribute API can be used for profile loading to define a user’s identity onto the device. This can be a lightweight equivalent of a SIM Profile & also support the eUICC flows for ownership switch (similar to a Profile Content Update Function)

Any AuthN & identity solution must support the limitations of loading profiles on smaller memory devices & requiring an authN flow over HTTP.

What will be the numbering & addressing standard for massively distributed devices?

This is more of an open question relating to the history of the service so that eUICC enabled devices will require an international mobile subscriber identity and LPWA & WIFI enabled devices will require a MAC addressing / IPv6 registry with the service provider.

The support for these addressing mechanisms and near field communication devices will have an impact of the network operator’s OSS IT architecture.

The GSMA proposal for eUICC uses the START-IMSI required for profile loading which supports roaming and allows for profile swap on change of ownership.

IPv6 offers a highly scalable address scheme. It provides 2128 unique addresses, which represents 3.4 × 1038addresses. In other words, more than 2 Billions of Billions addresses per square millimetre of the Earth surface. It is quite sufficient to address the needs of any present and future communicating device.

6LoWPAN provides a simple and efficient mechanism to shorten the IPv6 address size for constrained devices

Will the smart device co-ordination be through an embedded chip-set in the main home internet router?

Probably not but I would have said probably not 5 years ago and I still have not seen Zigbee co-ordinators or Thread border routers catch on as stand-alone devices.

I’ve not been blogging for a while, too much work is not an excuse, but will be updating more on these topics soon.